21 January 2013 -
There are interesting events
in the ongoing budget and debt limit crisis.
First, President Obama’s latest framing of the debt crisis irritates
me. Military.com reported on a forty-minute
White House press conference last week, in which the President said, “I’m
willing to find compromise and common ground (with Congress) on how to reduce
the deficit…but, there’s no room to debate about paying bills Congress has
already racked up.” Whoa! What does this mean, “bills Congress has already
racked up”? President Obama is range-gate stealing on one
topic to keep from being shot at on a related one. If you don’t know what that term means, you
either haven’t been around combat aircraft or you haven’t lived in our house. He cleverly framed his overall assessment of
the crisis a way that leaves his prior, contributing actions conveniently out of
the picture.
The contention that
Congress alone is responsible for the crushing debt would be laughable if it
weren’t so self-serving and obfuscating.
When the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress earlier in his first
term, President Obama enthusiastically spent money like the proverbial drunken
sailor—whom he threatens now not to pay.
But, I get ahead of myself. He championed
almost a trillion dollars in emergency bail-out spending, pushed for and
received large increases in federal employee numbers, praised his fellow
profligates in Congress when they expanded—and he happily signed—unemployment and
welfare benefits, prolonged the expensive war in Afghanistan to make it his
war, pushed through a liberty-squashing, fiscal albatross called Obamacare, and
proposed such idiotic budgets every year that he fell in league with the Senate
to enable four years of money-bleeding continuing resolutions, which nefariously
substitute for constitutionally mandated budgets. Only now that the Republican-controlled House
of Representatives is trying to use its role as the constitutional originators
of spending legislation in order to put some semblance of accountability back
into the budget process does the President try to lay this mess at the feet of
Congress. Nice try. It probably will work with those who benefit personally
from government largesse with tax-payer money.
After all, they don’t really care what happens to the nation, as long as
they get their Obamamoney! To me, it is dishonest
to perpetuate such conditions.
Speaking of who gets
what from the government and why, it is not surprising that Military.com highlighted
the issue of who among those who receive money every month from the government
will be affected if the debt ceiling is not raised in March.
“Though the Department of Veterans Affairs and
Pentagon were not discussed in any detail during the roughly 40-minute White
House press conference, veterans and troops – along with Social Security recipients
– topped the list of those Obama said will be adversely affected by a
government shutdown….’If congressional Republicans refuse to pay American bills
on time, Social Security benefits and veteran’s checks will be delayed,’ he
said. ‘We might not be able to pay our troops…’” “
Someone should tell the
President that such scare tactics are beneath the dignity of the office. What is more foolish is that the President cavalierly
and ignorantly exploited the deadly serious issue of nonpayment of soldiers to
threaten opponents in the political arena.
He should be far more careful with such topics. I doubt many of his political advisors have
any idea what the threat of not paying soldiers, if continued for any length of
time, can do to the cultural stability of a nation.
How important is paying
soldiers on time and paying them everything you contracted to pay them while on
active duty and later in retirement? Let
me explain what I have seen and experienced during my travels throughout the
world.
I am in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC) right now. You can
find the country by looking at Africa and going right to the center of the
continent under the hump. There is the
place that only one-in-a-thousand American high-school graduates can find on a map.
I am under contract with the Department of State as a Government Technical
Monitor. I oversee and report on five
DEPSTATE-funded military training contracts in one of the most dysfunctional countries
on earth. Why is the U.S. spending good
money on such a project? Because a
functioning, professional, and loyal military force is one of the vital pillars
of strength and stability of a country.
It doesn’t matter how large the force is, it matters how professional its
culture is and how loyal the soldiers are to their country, its constitutional
processes, and its people. If they are
such soldiers, their loyalty extends to the point where they will accept the
unlimited liability of the profession and be ready to die for their political
masters’ goals and objectives. Without
such a military, a country is ripe for collapse into squabbling and
self-serving regions, tribes, ethnic groups, and political-economic criminal
gangs. A military where mothers of all
stripes are proud to send their sons to serve the greater good keeps a country
together. That’s the ultimate goal of
our training; it is a lofty one.
Les Forces Armées de la
République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), those we are trying to professionalize,
consist of 120,000 to 140,000 soldiers. Nobody
knows for sure how many soldiers there are.
Why? For the fifty years since
independence from Belgium nobody has trained, paid, fed, garrisoned or inoculated
soldiers regularly enough to amass reliable records. As well, and this is important to the reason
for my rants, the military in the DRC consistently has been used as a political,
propaganda, and economic pawn by national and local “leaders” in their attempts
to seize and maintain political and
economic power. Under such abuse, the
FARDC, officers and individual soldiers, have largely abandoned a culture of
allegiance, loyalty, and personal sacrifice to any noble cause they may have
once embraced. I know first-hand that they
now are mostly just a bunch of hungry guys with guns. It is a proven recipe for tragedy.
Any military, no matter how
great the country from which it springs, can quickly arrive at such a state if its
soldiers aren’t paid, fed, housed, and kept healthy. Even killing the soldiers at a regular rate on
an ill-conceived and foolhardy battlefield does not have the same effect on
soldiers’ morale as their country not honoring its contract with them. Napoleon said that an army marches on its
stomach. I would say today that a
soldier commits only as completely as his or her country commits in
return. There are many reasons why a soldier
enlists. There is only one reason he or
she commits to serve for any length of time: his country’s proven commitment in
return. Soldiers are soldiers are
soldiers, no matter what uniform they wear or what language they speak. Abuse them and it is your loss.
Jason K. Stearns refers
to this strongly in his superb book on the Congo, “Dancing In the Glory of Monsters, The Collapse of the Congo and the
Great War of Africa.” He quotes a Congolese
lieutenant colonel, “The real challenge in the Congo…is not how to reform the
army, but how to reform the men in the army!
There is a serious problem with Homo
congoliensis.” What the rest of the
book strongly confirms is that the problem is not congenital; it is learned and
could be resolved if the soldiers were fed, paid, housed, and kept
healthy. Otherwise, today, the training
we provide from the outside will have little effect on the abysmal state of
affairs here. The wavering commitment of
the government to the military is 95% of the military’s problem.
We should never use
soldier’s pay as a political negotiation chip, or as a threat to the society,
in order to win political games. I
believe, and my experience throughout the world in the last three-plus decades
has borne out, that nothing is as sacred an obligation for a nation as honoring
its contractual commitment to those who are and have honorably committed to the
defense of that nation. It is a sacred contract,
unlike any government entitlement, benefit, or promise made to anybody else. To possibly undermine the assurance of this
sacred contract with such remarks, Mr., President, is to play the same game
that the monsters of the Congo play so very well. Shame
on you.
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